Many recent studies have highlighted the poor reading ability of a disturbingly high percentage of the population, both children and adults. Efforts are being made by government agencies and education groups to improve the reading and literacy of the general public. One of the fundamentals of reading is a thorough knowledge of the alphabet.
One approach to correcting this serious problem is to teach the alphabet by means of a game. Examples of alphabet blocks can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 21,798 issued to Hill and 1,477,255 issued to Fritz. Both of these disclose a block having five different letters of the alphabet and a numeral on the separate sides of the block. U.S. Pat. No. 3,811,206 issued to Gacetta discloses a board having raised numbers affixed to the upper surface and a set of twenty-six movable blocks marked to represent each letter of the alphabet. The blocks have an under surface which is recessed to mate with the number which corresponds to its sequence in the alphabet.
Playing cards have also been used in teaching the alphabet as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. D 56,985 issued to Moore and No. 4,192,513 issued to Feeley et al. The former discloses a deck of cards, each card having a separate letter of the alphabet displayed in upper case and lower case and a drawing of an object, the name of which is spelled with the first letter thereof being the letter displayed on the specific card. The latter discloses a card game which has a three letter natural alphabetical sequence. The second letter of the sequence is also imprinted in the upper and lower corners of the diamond shaped playing card. The cards also indicate a suit (spades, clubs, hearts or diamonds) and there are 26 cards in each suit. The reverse side of the card has a pattern design and is not imprinted with letters of the alphabet.
Despite these devices being available for many years, they are not widely used and the education problem is still a major one. Furthermore, the cited references do not present a technique to facilitate learning the alphabet as an orderly sequence to determine the letters preceding and succeeding one another.